The skies over America

As yet another air traffic control center in Cleveland, Stacey Taylor is keeping a close eye on her flights.  The FAA is warning controllers to watch transcontinental flights headed west, for anything suspicious. And then, something very suspicious does happen.

Stacey Taylor:   I hear one of the controllers behind me go “Oh my god, oh my god,” and he starts yelling for the supervisor.  He goes, "What is this plane doing, what is this plane doing?"

I wasn’t that busy at the time, and I pulled it up on my screen. And he was climbing and descending and climbing and descending but very, gradually. He’d go up 300 feet, and he’d go down 300 feet. And it turned out to be United 93.   

By this time, United Airlines has warned crews still in the air about the potential for a hijacking.  Electronic messages—similar to an e-mail, have been transmitted to pilots. “Beware, cockpit intrusion” the message read.

The pilots on Flight 93 typed back, “Confirmed.” Message received.  

Back in New York, controllers brace themselves for another possible assault on their airspace.

John Smith: I was wondering what else was gonna get hit?  How many more times this would happen ? Where would it happen? 

John Riccardi: But at that point it was, “What was next”?

9:30 a.m.
At Washington’s Dulles airport controllers also on high alert.  But what they don’t know is that one of their own flights is now missing: American 77. 

Flight 77 has been out of contact with controllers in Indianapolis for more than 20 minutes.  Fighter jets are dispatched to track the flight, but the plane already has turned east, flying back over West Virginia, toward Washington, D.C.

Todd Lewis is working radar at Dulles airport.                              

Todd Lewis: One of my colleagues saw a primary target moving quite fast from northwest to the southeast. Nobody knew that was American 77.

Brokaw:  What did you think, it was a military flight of some kind—

Lewis: I thought it was a military flight.  I thought that Langley  had scrambled some fighters and maybe one of ‘em got up there. 

Brokaw: It was really moving fast—

Lewis: It was moving very fast, like a military aircraft might move at a low altitude.

Brokaw: How long were you able to track what turned out to be American—

Lewis: It was heading right towards a prohibited area in downtown Washington. And that covers the Capitol and the White House. We then called the White House on the hotline, and let them know.

Controllers activate a hotline to the Secret Service—and within seconds, agents are frantically evacuating the White House. The president is in Florida, but the secret service whisks vice president Dick Cheney into an underground bunker.                 

Lewis: Then it turned south and away from the prohibited area, which seemed like a momentary sigh of relief.  And it disappeared. But it was going away from Washington, which seemed to be the right thing. 

9:38 a.m.
The plane does strike, crashing into the Pentagon.

Lewis:  Then there was no question that—yeah, it was a commercial flight. And you’re wondering—“We’re being attacked.  What’s next?” 

Washington D.C. is where United Flight 93 soon will be headed.  As American Flight 77 was breaching Washington’s airspace to eventually hit the Pentagon,  back in the skies over Youngstown, Ohio, Flight 93 still is on course, now airborne for more than 50 minutes. 

But now, as Stacey Taylor and other controllers watch, plane begins to suddenly change altitude. And the controller working Flight 93 hears a series of horrifying transmissions from the cockpit—

(Cockpit recording:) Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!

Get out of here! Mayday! Get out of here!

Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!

Get out of here! Mayday! Get out of here!

Then the voice of a hijacker:

Ladies and gentlemen, here it’s the captain. Please sit down. Keep remaining sitting. We have a bomb aboard

The controller tries repeatedly to contact the cockpit but there is no response. 

Taylor:  I was afraid of that flight.  I see this plane climbed up from his assigned altitude of 35,000 feet to 41,000 feet. Turned around and aimed right back at where we were.  And descended rapidly.  And when a plane descends too fast, the computer can’t keep up with it.  And you get Xs in the altitude box. So we knew he was aimed at us and descending very very rapidly. At that point I knew it was a confirmed hijacking.  I didn’t know where they were going, what they were doing.

We have all shuddered at the thought of what must have been going on in the cockpits of those hijacked airliners.  It turns out the Cleveland controller working United Flight 93 at the time, along with a supervisors, actually heard the sounds of the struggle in the cockpit.

Taylor: I said, "Did you guys talk to him?”  He goes, “Yeah, we talked to him.”  I said, “What did the pilot—?" He said, “It wasn’t the pilots,” he said, “It was the hijackers.” 

I said, “The hijackers?”   Are you telling me the hijackers were talking to you on the frequency?” 

He said, “The pilot opened up the mike before...” We heard it all.” I said, “What—?" 

He said, “We heard them being killed.” He said,  “We heard.” 

And I said, I said, “Don’t tell me any more.”  I said, “I don’t—I don’t wanna know anymore.” 

Like the other three planes before it, Flight 93 makes a radical turn east, shutting off the planes transponder signal. Controllers can now only see a moving  “target” on radar.  They have no other flight information.

Back at Newark tower, where Flight 93 took off only an hour before, Bob Varcadipane is trading phone calls with the FAA’s central command center in Herndon, Virginia.  The command center is telling him there are at least ten planes they’re still suspicious of for one reason or another — all possible hijackings. 

Bob Varcadapane: When I talked to the command center again, he told me that another aircraft was being hijacked.   And he said, “As a matter of fact, it’s one of your airplanes.”

Callahan: We were tracking United 93. And I was in conversation with the FBI agent and he was relaying to me that we suspect that this aircraft has now been taken over by hostile forces,  described the sharp turn it made over eastern Ohio and now was heading back along southwestern Pennsylvania.  And I could tell just by giving it a visual track that it was obviously heading for the Washington, D.C. area.

As Flight 93 speeds towards Washington D.C, the Federal Aviation Administration does something unprecedented in aviation history. Officials at the FAA command center order that the national airspace be completely shut down—the grounding of every single civilian plane in the sky.     

Controllers in the Boston and New York areas have already landed more than 1,000 planes from the Boston and New York air corridors. There are still 3,949 planes in the air. Controllers must still land every single one; as quickly as they can; at the nearest possible airport, no matter how far from their intended destination.

The controllers begin re-routing the planes at the rate of one every second.

Brokaw: And people were landing out here in Lacrosse, Wisconsin, and Peoria, Illinois.

Varcadapane: Oh, they were landing all over the country. This whole system, basically just shut down.

Brokaw: It looks like a daisy field and suddenly it goes dark.

At the Cleveland Center, Stacey Taylor is busy diverting planes to land, but can’t stop thinking about Flight 93.

Brokaw: You’re keeping your eye on Flight 93 at this point?

Taylor:  Yeah. And then the transponder came back on.  We got two hits off the transponder.  That’s something we’ve always wanted to know.  Why did the transponder come back on? 

And we’re thinking, “Oh, you know?  Maybe something’s happened. Maybe this isn’t what we think it is.”

10:03 a.m.
The transponder shuts off again.  Flight 93 disappears from radar.

Taylor: I had another airplane that I was working.  And I told him, I said, “Sir,” I said, “I think we have an aircraft down.” I said, “This is entirely up to you, but if you’d be willing to fly over the last place that we spotted this airplane—and see if you can see anything.  Any smoke, anything.” And he’s like, “Yeah, we’ll do that.”  So he flew over and at first he didn’t see anything  and then he said, “We see a great big plume or a cloud of smoke.” 

Brokaw: You knew it was down.

Taylor:  We knew.

A number of heroic passengers had launched their own counterattack on the cockpit—preventing the plane from reaching its presumed target: the nation’s capital. 

10:30 a.m. 
In just 45 minutes, controllers have safely landed almost 2,500 planes. But there are  still more than 1500 in the air and each one is a potential weapon. 

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